I suppose I'll prepare my nerves a bit as well as inform the small mass of ya'll reading about the student quiz show i'll be co-hosting next week.
GOLDEN BELLAbout a dozen schools will be sending their smartest students to compete in this academic competition. There will be roughly 120 students competing for the grand prize (a very large gift certificate to a department store, perhaps) and bragging rights to say that YOU rang the golden bell(only the winner gets to ring it, heh). The questions will be presented in English, but the answers will be accepted in both English and Korean.
There will be a Korean MC who will do a majority of the hosting duties, while I will be the native English speaker reading the questions. The questions are, of course, supposed to be difficult enough to weed out a few kids each round, but not so difficult to eliminate half the field in one question. Therefore, my secondary job will be to 'pump up' or 'deflate' the difficulty for each question in order to maintain an appropriate level of competition throughout the program.
There is a time limit to the competition, because this will be televised on the Nowon District's private TV station. So it won't be programmed into every TV in Seoul, just localized in my neighborhood on a select channel... come to think of it, i'm not even sure how one would go about watching this even if you did want to watch kids sweat through test questions read by a crazy foreigner. Regardless, it's my job to make sure we stay on schedule and weed out enough kids or keep enough kids alive to keep it interesting. I really just hope that somebody is keeping a sharp eye on which questions are too hard/easy so they can tell me what to say.
Lastly, the only other real concern is the Korean words that i'm expected to pronounce when reading these questions. I'll have some phonetic shorthand notes, but that won't save me from getting laughed at for my slaughtering of the word "cheomseongdae" or "daejanggyeong".
Wish me luck ^_^
